The Ego

3. The return of the Spirit so comprehended to Immediate Existence

^'802' This is why nothing is known which does not fall within experience, or (as it is also expressed) which is not felt to be true, which is not given as an inwardly revealed eternal verity, as a sacred object of belief, or whatever other expressions we care to employ.

Experience just consists in this, that the content – and the content is spirit – in its inherent nature is substance and so object of consciousness.

But this substance, which is spirit, is the development of itself explicitly to what it is inherently and implicitly; and only as this process of reflecting itself into itself is it essentially and in truth spirit. It is inherently the movement which is the process of knowledge – the transforming of that inherent nature into explicitness, of Substance into Subject, of the object of consciousness into the object of self-consciousness, i.e. into an object that is at the same time transcended – in other words, into the notion.

This transforming process is a cycle that returns into itself, a cycle that presupposes its beginning, and reaches its beginning only at the end.

So far as spirit, then, is of necessity this self-distinction, it appears as a single whole, intuitively apprehended, over against its simple self-consciousness.

Since that whole is what is distinguished, spirit is distinguished into the intuitively apprehended pure notion, Time, and the Content, the inherent, implicit, nature.

Substance, qua subject, involves the necessity, at first an inner necessity, to set forth in itself what it inherently is, to show itself to be spirit.

The completed expression in objective form is – and is only when completed – at the same time the reflexion of substance, the development of it into the self.

Consequently, until and unless spirit inherently completes itself, completes itself as a world-spirit, it cannot reach its completion as self-conscious spirit. The content of religion, therefore, expresses earlier in time than (philosophical) science what spirit is; but this science alone is the perfect form in which spirit truly knows itself.

^'803' The process of carrying forward this form of knowledge of itself is the task which spirit accomplishes as actual History.

The religious communion, as the substance of Absolute Spirit, is the crude form of consciousness. It is harsher and more barbaric the deeper its inner spirit is.

• Its inarticulate self has all the harder task in dealing with its essence, the content of its consciousness alien to itself.

Not till spirit has surrendered the hope of cancelling that foreignness by an external, i.e. alien, method does it turn to itself, to its own peculiar world, in the actual present.

It turns thither because to supersede that alien method means returning into self-consciousness. It thus discovers this world in the living present to be its own property; and so has taken the first step to descend from the ideal intelligible world, or rather to quicken the abstract element of the intelligible world with concrete self-hood.

Through “observation”, on the one hand, spirit finds existence in the shape of thought, and comprehends existence; and, conversely, it finds in its thought existence.(2)

At first, it has thus itself expressed in an abstract way the immediate unity of thought and existence, of abstract Essential Reality and Self; and when it has expressed the primal principle of “Light” in a purer form, viz. as unity of extension and existence – for “existence” is an ultimate simple term more adequate to thought than “light” – and in this way has revived again in thought the Substance of the Orient;(3) thereupon spirit at once recoils in horror from this abstract unity, from this self-less substantiality, and maintains as against it the principle of Individuality.(4)

But after Spirit has externalized this principle in the process of its culture, has thereby made it an objective existence and established it throughout the whole of existence, has arrived at the idea of “Utility”(5) and in the sphere of absolute freedom has grasped existence as its Individual Will,(6) – after these stages, spirit then brings to light the thought that lies in its inmost depths, and expresses essential Reality in the form Ego=Ego.(7)

This “Ego identical with Ego” is, however, the self-reflecting process; for since this identity qua absolute negativity is absolute distinction, the self-identity of the Ego stands in contrast to this absolute distinction, which – being pure distinction and at the same time objective to the self that knows itself – has to be expressed as Time.

In this way, just as formerly Essential Reality was expressed as unity of thought and extension, it would here be interpreted as unity of thought and time. But distinction left to itself, unresting, unhalting time, really collapses upon itself; it is the objective quiescence of extension; while this latter is pure identity with self – is Ego.

Ego is not merely self. It is identity of self with itself.

This identity, however, is complete and immediate unity with self. In other words, this Subject is just as much Substance.

Substance by itself alone would be void and empty Intuition (Anschauen), or the intuition of a content which qua specific would have merely a contingent character and would be devoid of necessity.

Substance would only stand for the Absolute in so far as Substance was thought of or “intuited” as absolute unity.

All content would, as regards its diversity, have to fall outside the Substance and be due to reflexion, a process which does not belong to Substance, because Substance would not be Subject, would not be conceived as Spirit, as reflecting about self and reflecting itself into self.

If, nevertheless, a content were to be spoken of, then on the one hand it would only exist in order to be thrown into the empty abyss of the Absolute, while on the other it would be picked up in external fashion from sense perception. Knowledge would appear to have come by things, by what is distinct from knowledge itself, and to have got at the distinctions between the endless variety of things, without any one understanding how or where all this came from.(8)

^'804' Spirit, however, has shown itself to us to be neither the mere withdrawal of self-consciousness into its pure inwardness, nor the mere absorption of self-consciousness into Substance and the nothingness of its (self-) distinction.

Spirit is the movement of the self which empties (externalizes) itself of self and sinks itself within its own substance, and qua subject, both has gone out of that substance into itself, making its substance an object and a content, and also supersedes this distinction of objectivity and content.

That first reflexion out of immediacy is the subject’s process of distinction of itself from its substance, the notion in a process of self-diremption, the going-into-itself and the coming into being of the pure ego. Since this distinction is the pure action of Ego=Ego, the notion is the necessity for and the rising of existence, which has the substance for its essential nature and subsists on its own account. But this subsisting of existence for itself is the notion established in determinate form, and is thereby the notion’s own inherent movement – that of descending into the simple substance, which is only subject by being this negativity and going through this process.

Ego has not to take its stand on the form of self-consciousness in opposition to the form of substantiality and objectivity, as if it were afraid of relinquishing or externalizing itself.

The power of spirit lies rather in:

• remaining one with itself when giving up itself
• establishing as mere moments its explicit self-existence and its implicit inherent nature
  • This is because it is self-contained and self-subsistent

Ego is not a tertium quid which casts distinctions back into the abyss of the Absolute, and declares them all to mean the same there.

On the contrary, true knowledge lies rather in the seeming inactivity which merely watches how what is distinguished is self-moved by its very nature and returns again into its own unity.